OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Coordinated Information Campaigns on Social Media: A Multifaceted Framework for Detection and Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

The prevalence of coordinated information campaigns in social media platforms has significant negative consequences across various domains, including social, political, and economic processes. This paper proposes a multifaceted framework for detecting and analysing coordinated message promotion on social media. By simultaneously considering features related to content, time, and network dimensions, our framework can capture the diverse nature of coordinated activity and identify anomalous user accounts who likely engaged in suspicious behaviour. Unlike existing solutions that rely on specific constraints, our approach is more flexible as it employs specialised components to extract the significant structures within a network and to detect the most unusual interactions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework using two Twitter datasets, the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), and long-term discussions on Data Science topics. The results demonstrate our framework's ability to isolate unusual activity from expected normal behaviour and provide valuable insights for further qualitative investigation.
OpenAi's GPT4 as coding assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Lately, Large Language Models have been widely used in code generation. GPT4 is considered the most potent Large Language Model from Openai. In this paper, we examine GPT3.5 and GPT4 as coding assistants. More specifically, we have constructed appropriate tests to check whether the two systems can a) answer typical questions that can arise during the code development, b) produce reliable code, and c) contribute to code debugging. The test results are impressive. The performance of GPT4 is outstanding and signals an increase in the productivity of programmers and the reorganization of software development procedures based on these new tools.
WiCV@CVPR2023: The Eleventh Women In Computer Vision Workshop at the Annual CVPR Conference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present the details of Women in Computer Vision Workshop - WiCV 2023, organized alongside the hybrid CVPR 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. WiCV aims to amplify the voices of underrepresented women in the computer vision community, fostering increased visibility in both academia and industry. We believe that such events play a vital role in addressing gender imbalances within the field. The annual WiCV@CVPR workshop offers a) opportunity for collaboration between researchers from minority groups, b) mentorship for female junior researchers, c) financial support to presenters to alleviate finanacial burdens and d) a diverse array of role models who can inspire younger researchers at the outset of their careers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive report on the workshop program, historical trends from the past WiCV@CVPR events, and a summary of statistics related to presenters, attendees, and sponsorship for the WiCV 2023 workshop.
Robotic Handling of Compliant Food Objects by Robust Learning from Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The robotic handling of compliant and deformable food raw materials, characterized by high biological variation, complex geometrical 3D shapes, and mechanical structures and texture, is currently in huge demand in the ocean space, agricultural, and food industries. Many tasks in these industries are performed manually by human operators who, due to the laborious and tedious nature of their tasks, exhibit high variability in execution, with variable outcomes. The introduction of robotic automation for most complex processing tasks has been challenging due to current robot learning policies. A more consistent learning policy involving skilled operators is desired. In this paper, we address the problem of robot learning when presented with inconsistent demonstrations. To this end, we propose a robust learning policy based on Learning from Demonstration (LfD) for robotic grasping of food compliant objects. The approach uses a merging of RGB-D images and tactile data in order to estimate the necessary pose of the gripper, gripper finger configuration and forces exerted on the object in order to achieve effective robot handling. During LfD training, the gripper pose, finger configurations and tactile values for the fingers, as well as RGB-D images are saved. We present an LfD learning policy that automatically removes inconsistent demonstrations, and estimates the teacher's intended policy. The performance of our approach is validated and demonstrated for fragile and compliant food objects with complex 3D shapes. The proposed approach has a vast range of potential applications in the aforementioned industry sectors.
Gravity Network for end-to-end small lesion detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces a novel one-stage end-to-end detector specifically designed to detect small lesions in medical images. Precise localization of small lesions presents challenges due to their appearance and the diverse contextual backgrounds in which they are found. To address this, our approach introduces a new type of pixel-based anchor that dynamically moves towards the targeted lesion for detection. We refer to this new architecture as GravityNet, and the novel anchors as gravity points since they appear to be "attracted" by the lesions. We conducted experiments on two well-established medical problems involving small lesions to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach: microcalcifications detection in digital mammograms and microaneurysms detection in digital fundus images. Our method demonstrates promising results in effectively detecting small lesions in these medical imaging tasks.
Organization Studies Based Appraisal of Institutional Propositions in the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

The papers appraised the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation wit the aim of exposing the institutional propositions contained in the regulation. The aim of the paper is to address how the institutional propositions positions organizations in Nigeria to implement data protections regulations.
A matter of attitude: Focusing on positive and active gradients to boost saliency maps
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Saliency maps have become one of the most widely used interpretability techniques for convolutional neural networks (CNN) due to their simplicity and the quality of the insights they provide. However, there are still some doubts about whether these insights are a trustworthy representation of what CNNs use to come up with their predictions. This paper explores how rescuing the sign of the gradients from the saliency map can lead to a deeper understanding of multi-class classification problems. Using both pretrained and trained from scratch CNNs we unveil that considering the sign and the effect not only of the correct class, but also the influence of the other classes, allows to better identify the pixels of the image that the network is really focusing on. Furthermore, how occluding or altering those pixels is expected to affect the outcome also becomes clearer.
Trusta: Reasoning about Assurance Cases with Formal Methods and Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Assurance cases can be used to argue for the safety of products in safety engineering. In safety-critical areas, the construction of assurance cases is indispensable. Trustworthiness Derivation Trees (TDTs) enhance assurance cases by incorporating formal methods, rendering it possible for automatic reasoning about assurance cases. We present Trustworthiness Derivation Tree Analyzer (Trusta), a desktop application designed to automatically construct and verify TDTs. The tool has a built-in Prolog interpreter in its backend, and is supported by the constraint solvers Z3 and MONA. Therefore, it can solve constraints about logical formulas involving arithmetic, sets, Horn clauses etc. Trusta also utilizes large language models to make the creation and evaluation of assurance cases more convenient. It allows for interactive human examination and modification. We evaluated top language models like ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and PaLM 2 for generating assurance cases. Our tests showed a 50%-80% similarity between machine-generated and human-created cases. In addition, Trusta can extract formal constraints from text in natural languages, facilitating an easier interpretation and validation process. This extraction is subject to human review and correction, blending the best of automated efficiency with human insight. To our knowledge, this marks the first integration of large language models in automatic creating and reasoning about assurance cases, bringing a novel approach to a traditional challenge. Through several industrial case studies, Trusta has proven to quickly find some subtle issues that are typically missed in manual inspection, demonstrating its practical value in enhancing the assurance case development process.
Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Weakly supervised object localization and semantic segmentation aim to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve pixel-level localization. While existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of the generator, this paper presents two astonishing experimental observations on the object localization learning process: For a trained network, as the foreground mask expands, 1) the cross-entropy converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. 2) The activation value continuously increases until the foreground mask expands to the object boundary. Therefore, to achieve a more effective localization performance, we argue for the usage of activation value to learn more object regions. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint (AMC) module is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using foreground region guidance and area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. In addition, our method also achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised semantic segmentation performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS-Extension.
What is the Title of this Paper? Solving logic puzzles using algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

This work delves into the realm of logic puzzles by focusing on the Knight and Knave problems popularized by Raymond Smullyan in his book series "What is the Name of This Book?". The puzzles revolve around characters known as Knights (truth-tellers) and Knaves (liars), challenging solvers to determine the true identity of each person based on their statements. This paper explores the utilization of Python algorithms to automate the process of solving these puzzles, offering a computational approach that enhances efficiency and accessibility. In this work, we aim to develop a Python algorithm capable of parsing and analyzing the statements provided in the Knight and Knave puzzles. A logical reasoning framework is integrated within the algorithm to deduce the identities of the characters based on their statements. The algorithm processes the input statements, create a knowledge base, and make deductions following the rules of Knight and Knave logic. The developed algorithm is thoroughly tested on various instances of Knight and Knave puzzles, comparing its results to known solutions and manual approaches. We further expand the scope of the problem by introducing a Normal (who can sometimes lie and sometimes say the truth).
Implementing Learning Principles with a Personal AI Tutor: A Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Effective learning strategies based on principles like personalization, retrieval practice, and spaced repetition are often challenging to implement due to practical constraints. Here we explore the integration of AI tutors to complement learning programs in accordance with learning sciences. A semester-long study was conducted at UniDistance Suisse, where an AI tutor app was provided to psychology students taking a neuroscience course (N=51). After automatically generating microlearning questions from existing course materials using GPT-3, the AI tutor developed a dynamic neural-network model of each student's grasp of key concepts. This enabled the implementation of distributed retrieval practice, personalized to each student's individual level and abilities. The results indicate that students who actively engaged with the AI tutor achieved significantly higher grades. Moreover, active engagement led to an average improvement of up to 15 percentile points compared to a parallel course without AI tutor. Additionally, the grasp strongly correlated with the exam grade, thus validating the relevance of neural-network predictions. This research demonstrates the ability of personal AI tutors to model human learning processes and effectively enhance academic performance. By integrating AI tutors into their programs, educators can offer students personalized learning experiences grounded in the principles of learning sciences, thereby addressing the challenges associated with implementing effective learning strategies. These findings contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the transformative potential of AI in education.
Computational Natural Philosophy: A Thread from Presocratics through Turing to ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.GL 2023
Year: 2023

Modern computational natural philosophy conceptualizes the universe in terms of information and computation, establishing a framework for the study of cognition and intelligence. Despite some critiques, this computational perspective has significantly influenced our understanding of the natural world, leading to the development of AI systems like ChatGPT based on deep neural networks. Advancements in this domain have been facilitated by interdisciplinary research, integrating knowledge from multiple fields to simulate complex systems. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, represent this approach's capabilities, utilizing reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Current research initiatives aim to integrate neural networks with symbolic computing, introducing a new generation of hybrid computational models.
Understanding Calibration of Deep Neural Networks for Medical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In the field of medical image analysis, achieving high accuracy is not enough; ensuring well-calibrated predictions is also crucial. Confidence scores of a deep neural network play a pivotal role in explainability by providing insights into the model's certainty, identifying cases that require attention, and establishing trust in its predictions. Consequently, the significance of a well-calibrated model becomes paramount in the medical imaging domain, where accurate and reliable predictions are of utmost importance. While there has been a significant effort towards training modern deep neural networks to achieve high accuracy on medical imaging tasks, model calibration and factors that affect it remain under-explored. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive empirical study that explores model performance and calibration under different training regimes. We considered fully supervised training, which is the prevailing approach in the community, as well as rotation-based self-supervised method with and without transfer learning, across various datasets and architecture sizes. Multiple calibration metrics were employed to gain a holistic understanding of model calibration. Our study reveals that factors such as weight distributions and the similarity of learned representations correlate with the calibration trends observed in the models. Notably, models trained using rotation-based self-supervised pretrained regime exhibit significantly better calibration while achieving comparable or even superior performance compared to fully supervised models across different medical imaging datasets. These findings shed light on the importance of model calibration in medical image analysis and highlight the benefits of incorporating self-supervised learning approach to improve both performance and calibration.
Walking-by-Logic: Signal Temporal Logic-Guided Model Predictive Control for Bipedal Locomotion Resilient to External Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This study proposes a novel planning framework based on a model predictive control formulation that incorporates signal temporal logic (STL) specifications for task completion guarantees and robustness quantification. This marks the first-ever study to apply STL-guided trajectory optimization for bipedal locomotion push recovery, where the robot experiences unexpected disturbances. Existing recovery strategies often struggle with complex task logic reasoning and locomotion robustness evaluation, making them susceptible to failures caused by inappropriate recovery strategies or insufficient robustness. To address this issue, the STL-guided framework generates optimal and safe recovery trajectories that simultaneously satisfy the task specification and maximize the locomotion robustness. Our framework outperforms a state-of-the-art locomotion controller in a high-fidelity dynamic simulation, especially in scenarios involving crossed-leg maneuvers. Furthermore, it demonstrates versatility in tasks such as locomotion on stepping stones, where the robot must select from a set of disjointed footholds to maneuver successfully.
NeRF-Enhanced Outpainting for Faithful Field-of-View Extrapolation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In various applications, such as robotic navigation and remote visual assistance, expanding the field of view (FOV) of the camera proves beneficial for enhancing environmental perception. Unlike image outpainting techniques aimed solely at generating aesthetically pleasing visuals, these applications demand an extended view that faithfully represents the scene. To achieve this, we formulate a new problem of faithful FOV extrapolation that utilizes a set of pre-captured images as prior knowledge of the scene. To address this problem, we present a simple yet effective solution called NeRF-Enhanced Outpainting (NEO) that uses extended-FOV images generated through NeRF to train a scene-specific image outpainting model. To assess the performance of NEO, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on three photorealistic datasets and one real-world dataset. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets showcase the robustness and potential of our method in addressing this challenge. We believe our work lays a strong foundation for future exploration within the research community.
Discwise Active Learning for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While LiDAR data acquisition is easy, labeling for semantic segmentation remains highly time consuming and must therefore be done selectively. Active learning (AL) provides a solution that can iteratively and intelligently label a dataset while retaining high performance and a low budget. In this work we explore AL for LiDAR semantic segmentation. As a human expert is a component of the pipeline, a practical framework must consider common labeling techniques such as sequential labeling that drastically improve annotation times. We therefore propose a discwise approach (DiAL), where in each iteration, we query the region a single frame covers on global coordinates, labeling all frames simultaneously. We then tackle the two major challenges that emerge with discwise AL. Firstly we devise a new acquisition function that takes 3D point density changes into consideration which arise due to location changes or ego-vehicle motion. Next we solve a mixed-integer linear program that provides a general solution to the selection of multiple frames while taking into consideration the possibilities of disc intersections. Finally we propose a semi-supervised learning approach to utilize all frames within our dataset and improve performance.
Joint Explainability and Sensitivity-Aware Federated Deep Learning for Transparent 6G RAN Slicing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, wireless networks are evolving complex, which upsurges the use of zero-touch artificial intelligence (AI)-driven network automation within the telecommunication industry. In particular, network slicing, the most promising technology beyond 5G, would embrace AI models to manage the complex communication network. Besides, it is also essential to build the trustworthiness of the AI black boxes in actual deployment when AI makes complex resource management and anomaly detection. Inspired by closed-loop automation and Explainable Artificial intelligence (XAI), we design an Explainable Federated deep learning (FDL) model to predict per-slice RAN dropped traffic probability while jointly considering the sensitivity and explainability-aware metrics as constraints in such non-IID setup. In precise, we quantitatively validate the faithfulness of the explanations via the so-called attribution-based \emph{log-odds metric} that is included as a constraint in the run-time FL optimization task. Simulation results confirm its superiority over an unconstrained integrated-gradient (IG) \emph{post-hoc} FDL baseline.
Unveiling Ethereum's Hidden Centralization Incentives: Does Connectivity Impact Performance?
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and sustainable, shifting to PoS without sacrificing the security and resilience of PoW, Ethereum offers a range of consensus clients to participate in the network. In this paper, we present a methodology to measure the performance of the consensus clients based on the latency to receive messages from the p2p network. The paper includes a study that identifies the incentives and limitations that the network experiences, presenting insights about the latency impact derived from running the software in different locations.